After 38 people are injured when CTA train hits snowplow, many questions about what went wrong
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A total of 38 people were injured, and 23 of them went to the hospital, when a CTA Yellow Line train collided with a piece of snow-removal equipment near the Howard Terminal in Rogers Park on Thursday morning.
As CBS 2 Investigator Dave Savini reported, it is going to be a long process to determine what went wrong.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators will be digging into the train crash - piece by piece. All communications will be reviewed, including and every piece of data recording and all the speeds.
There will be an investigation to see if human error was to blame for the accident.
The big question is how a massive snowplow built specially to clean train tracks ended up on the same track as a train full of people on a 60-degree day.
The Chicago Transit Authority's snow fighter machines are four special and massive snowplows with blades in front so they can chop through snow in ice. Brushes clear away the rest of the snow at the rear.
The snow fighter is also made to brush the third rail, so that the electric train cars can have a clean connection with the voltage coming from the energized rail.
The Yellow Line, or Skokie Swift, runs through the Howard rail yard on its way to the terminal. The accident happened just at the point where the trains enter the yard from a below-grade trench from the north and west – taking a sharp curve.
The train involved in the accident Thursday morning was traveling in the same direction as the snow fighter, and the train appears to have slammed into the plow's back side.
Savin spoke to DePaul University transportation expert Joe Schwieterman about the next steps.
"For any equipment, repair equipment, snow plow on the tracks lots - of unanswered questions," Scwhieterman said. "The CTA has some explaining to do as to how this could occur."
Schweieterman said there are systems in place to record what happened, as an analogue to a black box on an airplane.
"With Positive Train Control technology, they can tell exactly how fast it was traveling," he said. "Of course, we have communications taped, so we'll have all that."
Positive Train Control is a federally mandated computerized safety system designed to prevent crashes.
PTC monitors a train's weight, speed, and track conditions; taking control of the train – even stopping it – if for some reason the engineer is going too fast, or has the train too close to another vehicle.
Speaking to CBS 2's Joe Donlon and Marie Saavedra live on CBS 2's 4 p.m. newscast Thursday, Schwieterman also said there were questions about why the motorman did not stop for the snow-fighting vehicle, and whether the motorman was nonresponsive. There were recordings suggesting radio calls went out and there was no response, Schwieterman said.
"Kind of multiple things happened here that led to a really devastating outcome," Schwieterman said.
We have learned the snow fighter plow in the incident Thursday has in the past gone in for repairs just a few miles away from the crash - at a special repair shop just north of the accident site.
The repair shop is called the CTA's Skokie Heavy Maintenance Shop, and it is located on Oakton Street at Hamlin Avenue in Skokie. It is very possible the plow had just left that shop and was heading to another location in the CTA system for future use.
